— By Plasteurope.com staff — 

The Pearl Group (Dubai, UAE; www.pearlpolyurethane.com) has built a fifth PU system house, which is located near Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. The rapidly expanding company – which emerged from the former PU system house JV with Bayer MaterialScience and later Covestro – is already planning two further plants in Egypt and India, CEO Martin Kruczinna told Plasteurope.com. His medium-term goal is to become the global market leader for polyurethane system solutions, to which the sales office in Germany will also contribute.

The Vietnamese plant with a capacity of 20,000 t/y for PU systems and prepolymers will also serve other Southeast Asian countries in addition to the local market – among them Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines, as well as Australia. According to Kruczinna, deliveries to South Korea and Japan are also conceivable. Kruczinna did not provide any information on the scope of the investment or the current number of employees.

Related: Pearl Group plans to expand export business to Europe, Asia

Instead of consolidating or withdrawing from some markets – one example is Dow’s review of the PU line in Europe – Pearl is investing counter-cyclically and plans to fill the resulting gaps with customer service. Production facilities are planned in Egypt – where the go-ahead is to be given at the beginning of 2025 – and in India by the middle of the year. The sister company in Saudi Arabia, which started production at the end of 2023, has already expanded its capacity in spring 2024. With these investments, Pearl – assuming a capacity of 20,000 t/y for each of the new plants – should reach its target of a total of 120,000 t/y by 2026, as planned.